Political, Religious, Personal: The US, Israel, and the World

I had a dream of doing one single blog entry that would encompass all of my political beliefs so I could get them all down I one place and, in keeping with this blog's original purpose, never have to explain myself again. I would just give people the link and let them read it and get back to me. But then when I decided to start by defining terms, I was going to end up with around 20 pages of definitions, so I've decided to instead just keep putting things down as they come up (sort of), and if I change my opinion on something I'll do an edit. Today's topic, which has actually been brought up on and off for the past several months, is Israel, and why I, unlike a lot of people with bumper stickers it seems, don't stand with it.

It's really hard to know where to start this explanation, because all my various opinions on US foreign policy and my own religious attitudes are connected to it. I'm just going to have to start somewhere, and if you find it a bit confusing, it's probably a result of the fact that this is a complex issue, and I must admit I'm nowhere near the writer I used to be.

I think it's probably better if I state the religious part first, because the political part comes from that.

I have had several discussions with American Christians who for one reason or another think that the Jews are still God's chosen people. Now I have to admit that this is strictly an interpretation question. After years of study, I'm no closer to being able to answer the question of God's opinion towards Jews in a post-Christian world. The Bible makes it clear that Christians are supposed to be spiritual successors of the Jews, sanctified through Jesus under the new law as the Jews were through Moses under the old law. There are also several passages that state that Christians are co-heirs with the Jews, and supposed to become “spiritually circumcised” in ways that make it look like both doctrines are supposed to continue. There are also several passages that state that Christians are supposed to put aside Jewish doctrine and tradition and separate themselves to Christ regardless of what the Jews do.

Now, my interpretation for a long time has been that there was a lot of muddying of the waters in the first century. Most of the Christians in the churches the scriptural letters are written to were Jews, and the conflict that Paul in particular writes about the most is how Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians are supposed to make things work side-by-side. The Jewish tradition at the time required them to be so separate from the Gentiles that Jesus wasn't even allowed to enter a Gentile household to heal someone, and Peter required three visions from God before he would go preach to a Gentile convert-in-the-making. Plus you had former Jews and former pagans trying to worship under the doctrine of Jesus, and there are a lot of cases where the Jews are told they ought to continue to keep the Mosaic law, while the Gentiles are not, but are required to give up their pagan traditions. Like I said, it was a messy time, and it took several letters from apostles to get it together, so it's understandably a little confusing now.

Going on that interpretation, I don't think the Jews are God's chosen people anymore. I think their “chosen” status was transferred to Christians, and that the promise made to Abraham concerning his descendants no longer refers to his biological offspring because Jesus transferred it to his spiritual successors. But I have to admit that you can read the passages the other way if you're so minded. Now I don't understand why anyone who thinks that way would be a Christian instead of converting to Judaism, but that's a question for another day.

Following from that though, if the Jews are no longer God's chosen people, then Christians are not under any particular obligation to them; certainly no more than to any other group. I've stated before elsewhere that I don't think we're on the right side in the struggle between Judaism and Islam for example. Muslims have more in common with Christians than Jews do; at least Muslims accept the divinity of Jesus's teachings even if they don't accept the divinity of Jesus Himself.

Where things start to separate for me, though, is when we get to the state of Israel. Let's stipulate for a moment that Jews really are a special group to God: how does it follow that Christians have a duty to preserve a country for them? I can find no scriptural evidence for that at all. In fact, God was the one who let the original kingdom of Israel split into two states, and then let them both be taken by foreign powers, warning them in advance it would happen because they'd been so sinful in idolatry without repentance. The Babylonians conquered Judah and took the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (with some Levites) into captivity; the Assyrians captured the rest of the kingdom and annihilated the other tribes. When the Medes and Persians captured the former Babylonian empire, they let the Jews go back to their homeland, and the Alexandrian dynasty that took over after that didn't bother them either. But God still let that restored Jewish state get captured by the Romans just a few hundred years later. After Jesus's resurrection, just before He ascended to heaven, His own followers asked if He would restore the kingdom to them. Jesus just sighed and said they still didn't get it. It seems pretty clear to me God wouldn't have let Israel be conquered a second time, particularly since the Jews had not gone to idol worship this time, unless it had fulfilled its purpose and wasn't needed anymore.

If God really doesn't care whether there's an earthly Jewish state (which He doesn't seem to, given how little He's done to preserve one for them), then why do we as Christians care one way or the other? I'm not anti-Israel, or anti-Semitic, or whatever other charges you'd care to level at me. I'm fine with the Jews having their own state. Why not? The Germans do, the Russians do, the Chinese do, the Arabs do, the Turks do, and so forth. But why is it our duty as Christians to make darn sure the Jews have their own state more than any of those other groups? Even if you buy that they're still the chosen of God, which I don't, why do the other chosen of God need to risk our own safety, liberty, lives, global reputation, etc. in defense of any earthly, worldly, political state? That's not rhetorical. I don't have a satisfactory answer. I might change my opinion if someone could give me one.

Where things really go their separate ways for me is when we move beyond the religious questions of how Christians and Jews ought to behave towards each other and enter the political world. I have mentioned previously my admiration for Henry Kissinger, and my endorsement of realpolitik in practice. I ought to clarify how that applies here before I get into the serious discussion of why we ought to drop Israel as an ally, but I want to say one final thing on the nature of religion when it comes to nations: America is a country; it's not a person. It does not have a soul to save or lose. As an institution, the duty of the USA and its government is to its citizens, not to doing the right thing. America is fully justified in doing evil to others if it serves the needs of its people, and this applies to every other country in the world as well. If we want “the right thing” and “the needs of the people” to coincide, that's up to us. It would take massive political reform to really make those decisions viable again, but that's also a topic for another day. For now, just understand that I don't judge America (or any other nation) as good or evil on the same criteria that I use to judge myself (or another individual human being).

To clarify my stated position, I believe it's right (or at least defensible) for nations to make their friends and allies based on real world considerations like who has material resources, who has a strong military, and such rather than more idealistic concerns like who's torturing their own people or using the wrong form of government. If you take an honest look at even our history, let alone world history, what you see is that those are the sorts of reasons we make those decisions by anyway. Because America tries to be idealistic, we end up lying to ourselves a lot in ways other countries don't have to. Once America decides it needs a country, it has to rationalize that they are a “good guy” nation, no matter what the reality. A lot of our problems nowadays come from the hypocrisy this rationalizing caused us during the Cold War. We propped up or even installed a lot of “bad guy” regimes because the people we supported opposed communism, and that was enough for us to tell ourselves they weren't evil. We were even telling their victims that, while insisting to ourselves that those citizens must have done something to be slow-roasted by hot coals over wire cot frames a la the Shah of Iran, or that the ethnic cleansing campaign couldn't have been as bad as we were hearing, as with Saddam Hussein. If we had been more honest with ourselves and with other countries then, we probably wouldn't be involved in a lot of the fighting we're involved in now. What's more, the war in Iraq, for example, could have been over and done with by now if we'd been honest about needing to defend our oil interests – which I see as a legitimate reason for a nation to go to war – rather than attempting to wrap it up in positive idealistic motivations. We went to war to avenge our dead from September 11th (another motivation that's fine on a national level but personally abhorrent, although not one we needed to lie about, strangely enough), and to depose the corrupt regime of Saddam Hussein after we'd spent 30 years supporting it. The thing is, it's now the idealistic wrapping paper that's holding us in the fight. Saddam's dead; Bin Laden's dead; al-Qaeda is defunct; the Taliban is all but destroyed; and we still have our oil. The only thing keeping us there is the idea that we have to rebuild these “liberated” nations, which their own citizens still see as us occupying their country and dictating how they live, which is breeding more of the same violence we keep saying we have to stop. To put it briefly, you can't put a fire out with gasoline, no matter how many times you write 'water' on the gas can.

So, our double-faced attitude to realpolitik is getting us into more of the same trouble it got us into in the first place. How does that relate to the state of Israel? Because America, for reasons going all the way back to our national attitudes before WWII, has placed Israel squarely in the “good guy” camp. We used to nationally support the phrase “ethnic self-determinism”; the idea that any and every ethnic group ought to be able to form its own state and govern itself. Hitler used this very argument in his own defense of his initial expansions: “The Sudetenland is full of Germans who would like to be part of Germany. If Czechoslovakia would let them vote on it, they'd vote to leave and join Germany. We're just standing up for their right to be with their own people.” It was the same argument we used when we supported letting Yugoslavia break up into its various component pieces, and to some extent to letting the Soviet Union break up. The thing is, we couldn't stand on principle and break the Soviet Union up because, unlike any other country we've dealt with in 70 years, if we tried to destroy the Soviet Union, they had the ability to destroy us back. If we'd really been the fervent idealists we said we were, we'd have risked that total annihilation to liberate the Turks, Uygurs, Bulgars, Magyars, Romani, and various non-Russian Slavs that were all held by the Soviet regime.

When it comes to a country that is every bit as dangerous as we are, we realize it's not worth dying for. When it comes to a collection of countries that, even combined, couldn't attack us even if their lives depended on it, well, we'll back our ally no matter what. We'll bravely stand on our side of the respective oceans and tell the whole Middle East that whatever Israel does, we're behind them. Alone, Israel is like any other country in the region. With its good buddy the USA standing behind it, it's more or less granted superpower status by association.

Now, I've already talked about why, morally, I don't think there's any reason for the Christians to help the Jews over any other group, but I don't see why America has any moral obligation to support the state of Israel where it is on ideological grounds either. A brief look at the Internet says there are around 6,212,000 Jews in Israel as of 2014; compared to 6,500,000 in the US (some estimates as high as 6,750,000). It would honestly make more sense, if the US wants to support an independent Jewish state, for us to declare one somewhere here than to keep supporting them over there. I could get behind that, morally and politically. There is nothing wrong with us giving up some of our land to create a Jewish state; particularly since we have more Jews than Israel does! On top of which, Israel was created by the UN by giving them someone else's land. It was just proclaimed, just like that. No one ever thought to ask any of the people already living there if they minded being part of a specifically Jewish state that was going to set up right there where they already lived. This violates that same principle of ethnic self-determinism, because the majority Arab ethnic group that was going to be displaced didn't have any say in the matter. It wasn't like the division between India and Pakistan, for example, where both sides agreed that there needed to be separate states, they worked out a treaty, and they separated. This was flat-out strong-arming: one group told a second group that a third group got to have their land, and a fourth heavily-armed group was backing them up. Imagine some people you've never met show up unannounced and start moving into your house. The homeowner's association said they could because the people you bought the house from had stolen it from your new housemates' great-great-grandparents. And if you have a problem with that, you can either move out or just be quiet, because the police are enforcing their claim over yours. So from its foundation right up to the minute, we've been nothing but hypocritical on the subject.

So, to summarize, I don't agree with the US continuing to support the state of Israel where it is on any level. God gave it to them in the Old Testament, but then God also took it away in the Old Testament. The UN, citing ethnic self-determinism, gave it to them in violation of ethnic self-determinism. The US, citing a shaky interpretation of the Bible, continues to support this when it would honestly make better sense politically to side with their enemies, and be more justified morally to give them some of our land instead.